Peter Dickinson - Eva

“May I?” she murmured.

“You’re just another monkey, remember,” said Eva.

It was the gesture, like one of Lana’s or Dinks’s, that had put the thought into her mind, and she was really saying it only to Joan, but the mike picked the words up loud enough for everyone to hear. There was laughter and a drop in tension. Joan smiled her thin smile as she took the mike.

“Eva is almost right,” she said. “I am, in fact, an ape, not a monkey, and so are chimpanzees. Eva’s argument is that one species is not entitled to exploit another, one individual member of a species is not entitled even to save its own life, or the life of its child, at the expense of the life of a member of another species. I’m afraid this is nonsense. I would point out that when there were still wild chimpanzees, they hunted and ate any small monkeys they could catch, whereas for humans to eat monkeys was comparatively uncommon. Most civilized people would have regarded eating anything so human-seeming with revulsion, and among primitive peoples it was often taboo, even in areas where monkeys were common and meat a luxury. What I might call unconscious moral standards in these matters are already quite high. It is unlikely that a chimpanzee would have any such qualms. And when it comes to my own work, I, of course, recognize that I must also exercise conscious moral standards. I certainly have no right to expend the life of a member of another species on frivolities. But I have no doubt at all that I had, and have, the right to do so in order to save a human life, as I did for Eva.”

She saw Eva’s fingers move on the keys and paused.

“Not to save my life. Just to know.”

Joan nodded.

“All right,” she said, “though that is not entirely fair. I was delighted for Eva and her parents when our first transfer succeeded. Eva herself could tell you how unhappy I was about what had happened in the case of Stefan and of Sasha ...”

“Caesar?” interrupted Eva. “Angel?”

“Who? Oh, the two chimpanzees. No, my feelings about them are different, and I would maintain quite properly so. Their lives have not been wasted. We have learned less than we hoped from them, but we might have learned a great deal and that is my justification. In this case, the knowledge might have led almost immediately to the saving or prolonging of human life, but when my father began his work with flatworms such an outcome could not have been foreseen. Flatworms are fairly primitive life-forms, and no doubt some of you would want to draw a line somewhere on the scale between them and the chimpanzees, above which it would be improper to use the animal. This makes no sense to me. I do not know how many flatworms died in the course of our experiments—the figure must have run into thousands—but I do know that not one of them died unnecessarily. By their deaths each of them minutely advanced human knowledge. Without their deaths Eva would not be here today.”

As she let go of the microphone the silky man grabbed it and edged away. Still up on the table, Eva sat down and huddled into herself. She felt empty, despairing, her big chance wasted. The journalists had looked at her, but they hadn’t listened. They weren’t interested. All most of them wanted to do was to get the conference back to the humans, to Stefan and Sasha and what had happened to them, and how ghastly it must have been for their families, and so on. “One at a time, one at a time,” the silky man kept saying.

As the shouting rose Eva bowed her head. She was wearing a pair of yellow overalls, Mom’s latest, lightweight because of the shaper lights, with a huge green-and-purple butterfly on the bib. The shouts and arguments—Mike and Grog’s other friends were still trying to ask questions about chimp rights—had their usual effect of making her pelt prickle and bush out, so that she could feel the pressure of the overalls enclosing her. She felt like a bubble, a bubble of frustration and anger, and now the bubble seemed to be inside her, rising up, so that she had to leap to her feet and face the human pack and let the bubble burst out in one loud bark, which echoed around the room in the sudden silence.

It wasn’t enough. She had to do or say something more. They were waiting. Not words, nothing human. Deliberately she let her inward urges loose. Her hands gripped the hem of her bib and dragged it up until she could nick the point of a corner tooth into the cloth. She pulled down. The hem gave. Using all her strength, she ripped the overalls apart right down to the crotch and let go. The yellow cloth crumpled around her ankles. She stepped out of the mess and knuckled away naked along the table, past Joan, past the silky man where he sat clutching the microphone, down off the table, and out of the room. Behind her she heard the trance of silence break. She did not glance back. The bay of the human pack dwindled along the corridor.

YEAR TWO,

MONTH FIVE,

DAY NINE

Living with human grief . . .

The wreck of half their hopes . . .

The loss, almost, of their love . . .

Sharing the wreck, the loss, the grief . . .

But living with other hopes and other loves . . .

Living with purpose.

You reach a sort of calm where you all accept that what’s done’s done, but there’s no going back to where you were before. When Mom comes home from work you get her her vodka and orange juice and give her a hug, but you don’t sit in her lap and finger through her hair while she drinks it. You listen to Dad at supper, and make encouraging grunts and ask the right questions, but you don’t ask the wrong questions—nothing about the future of the Reserve, nothing about funds, nothing about Grog.

You have to learn about Grog in other ways, because you aren’t allowed to see him anymore.

The morning after the press conference Ms. Callaway had come over. She had telephoned before and asked Mom and Dad to stay at home and for Eva not to go to school. She explained that by publicly criticizing Honeybear for dressing chimps up in human clothes Eva had broken important clauses in the contracts with World Fruit and SMI. They would overlook it this time, but they were going to insist on a strict code from now on about what Eva was allowed to do or say. If she broke any of the code, they wouldn’t just cut off funds to the Pool and Eva’s company, they would also sue Eva’s company for damages. Eva’s company had no assets except Eva herself, and she was highly valuable. The legal question of whom she belonged to was still unresolved, so any lawsuit was likely to be extremely expensive, and might end with Eva finding that she belonged to SMI, a piece of property they could do what they liked with . . .

Eva was amazed. She’d known before she got home that Mom was going to be upset—very upset—and Dad might be angry, which he had been. But this level of fuss! It was almost mad, except that Mom and Dad didn’t seem quite so surprised.

“Now is this all quite clear to you too, Eva?” Ms. Callaway had said.

“On a talk show or something—if they ask me?”

“You must support the policies and products of the companies in question.”

“Uh-uh.”

“In that case you had better refuse invitations to appear on programs other than those in which an agreed list of questions is adhered to. This will somewhat restrict your appearances, I’m afraid.”

“Okay. Provided they don’t stop me from going to the Reserve.”

Ms. Callaway didn’t know about the Reserve and looked blank.

“If you must,” said Mom.

“Out of harm’s way,” said Dad.

“I must further emphasize,” said Ms. Callaway, “that SMI owns complete rights to all reproductions of any performance by Eva, and this includes the unfortunate episode last night. They will refuse permission for all future showings of it, and any such showings will be illegal. All tapes will be regarded as pirated, and their owners prosecuted. Any support by you for such a showing, public or private, will be treated as a breach of the contract, with the consequences I have spoken of. I expect you recorded the conference—may I have the tape, please?”